The Myths of Liberal Zionism

by Yitzhak Laor, José Saramago (Foreword by)

Overview

One of Israel’s most controversial writers demystifies the “peace camp” liberals

Yitzhak Laor is one of Israel’s most prominent dissidents and poets, a latter-day Spinoza who helps keep alive the critical tradition within Jewish culture. In this work he fearlessly dissects the complex attitudes of Western European liberal Left intellectuals toward Israel, Zionism and the “Israeli peace camp.”

He argues that through a prism of famous writers like Amos Oz, David Grossman and A.B. Yehoshua, the peace camp has now adopted the European vision of “new Zionism,” promoting the fierce Israeli desire to be accepted as part of the West and taking advantage of growing Islamophobia across Europe.

The backdrop to this uneasy relationship is the ever-present shadow of the Holocaust. Laor is merciless as he strips bare the hypocrisies and unarticulated fantasies that lie beneath the love affair between “liberal Zionists” and their European supporters.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781784786281
Publisher:	Verso Books
Publication date:	01/31/2017
Pages:	192
Product dimensions:	5.06(w) x 7.78(h) x 0.58(d)

About the Author

Yitzhak Laor is a distinguished Israeli poet, novelist and veteran political activist. A longtime editor and writer for the daily newspaper Haaretz, he now also edits an independent journal of literature and political thought, Mita‘am.

Editorial Reviews

These five long essays— first published in English by Laor, an Israeli poet, playwright, novelist and political commentator—focus not so much on “liberal Zionism,” a term he never defines, but on such subjects as Israeli leaders' appropriation of the Holocaust to gain victim status and, Laor believes, to persecute Palestinians. He also takes on European philo-Semitism and what he sees as the false leftist credentials of such Israelis in the “peace camp” as the writers Amos Oz and A.B. Yehoshua. Laor himself subscribes to the anti-Zionist shibboleth that “Zionism has no source of legitimization except the old colonial discourse.” Meanwhile, the Palestinians are represented solely as victims, and his prose is often tendentious, as when he writes that the Israeli army's pursuit of Palestinian terrorists in March 2004 marked “a systematic expansion of the activity of its death squads.” There are a few valuable insights, as when Laor focuses on Yehoshua's ambivalent, and sometimes negative, feelings about Israelis who, like himself, whose families have come from Arab countries. But Laor's work lacks nuance and a sense of balance. (Nov. 23)

Publishers Weekly

Israel’s most celebrated dissident, and perhaps its greatest living poet.”
—Harper’s

“Brave, yes—Laor is a poet—determined, yes—his unmasking of the hypocrisy of Israeli writers such as Amos Oz is irrefutable—modest, yes—he often speaks of his doubts—yet what makes his book so original and urgent is its historical reasoning: a disciple of Herodotus, Laor observes, narrates and questions all the ancient and contemporary half-truths concerning Jews, Europe and colonialism, which have culminated in Israel turning Gaza into a Ghetto! You do not simply read through, you think through this essential book.”
—John Berger

“A gift, incredible and beautiful, so wonderful that I am sure that the American Zionist community will spurn it.”
—Electronic Intifada

From the Publisher